Erika Wendt, née ''Erika Schwarze'' (1917 – 9 April 2003) was a German

secretary A secretary, administrative professional, administrative assistant, executive assistant, administrative officer, administrative support specialist, clerk, military assistant, management assistant, office secretary, or personal assistant is a w ...

. During World War II, she was active as a Swedish

spy Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangib ...

as an employée of August Fincke, the German

attaché In diplomacy, an attaché is a person who is assigned ("to be attached") to the diplomatic or administrative staff of a higher placed person or another service or agency. Although a loanword from French, in English the word is not modified accor ...

of trade in

Stockholm Stockholm () is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, largest city of Sweden as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people liv ...

. Wendt was of partially Jewish ancestry, and her father's publication business in

Stralsund Stralsund (; Swedish: ''Strålsund''), officially the Hanseatic City of Stralsund (German: ''Hansestadt Stralsund''), is the fifth-largest city in the northeastern German federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania after Rostock, Schwerin, Neub ...

had been confiscated by the

Nazi Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...

s. From January 1942, she was a secretary of the German attaché of trade in

. She provided information about secret

Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...

operations and agents active in Sweden under the

code In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...

name Onkel (Uncle). The Germans changed the codes on 1 March 1943, and she helped the Swedes to break the new codes by sending several messages uncoded. After this, Wendt received an order to return to Germany, not knowing that she was to be executed, and was taken into custody by the Swedish security police which provided her with a new identity. She lived the rest of her life in Sweden and published her

memoir A memoir (; , ) is any nonfiction narrative writing based in the author's personal memories. The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be factual. While memoir has historically been defined as a subcategory of biography or autobi ...

s in 1993.

References

* Erika Wendt: ''Kodnamn Onkel'' (Code name Uncle) Bonniers (1993) {{DEFAULTSORT:Wendt, Erika 1917 births People of the C-byrån Female wartime spies 2003 deaths Women in World War II German people of World War II World War II spies for Sweden

See also

References